Creative Ideas

ROLE PLAYING AID

It has been brought to our attention that both the Combat Cards& the Fantasy Cardscan serve as useful aids in running role-playing campaigns - especially to resolve combats that do not directly involve the player characters, but may still have an important bearing on the campaign.

Who hasn't played in a role playing campaign where the heroes set out on a mission or quest along with a company of the king's guard or a platoon of colonial marines escorting them?

The extra troops are not there do the heroes' work for them, but rather to support the heroes in some important role - such as keeping the escape route open from marauding orcs while the heroes explore, or by holding the alien monstrosities at bay while the heroes search a wreck site.

Unfortunately, playing out a side battle that doesn't involve the heroes, at the level of detail that most role playing games do, may prove impractical and tedious - and result in too much precious game time being taken away from the action involving the characters.

Yet the success of these troops and their mission is important to the story line and will eventually affect the heroes, so some attention should be given to their struggle and its outcome.

That is where the Combat Cards& Fantasy Cardscan really be a life saver. With the simplicity of generic unit types, the speed of play, and the ease of teaching the rules to newbies, they can be an efficient and effective way to resolve those important side battles - without taking too much time away from the main adventure.

The narrative nature of the Cardsalso allow game masters flexibility in determining how important aspect of the battle will mesh with the role playing action as well with the role playing system being used.

(Some examples being: How many rounds went by before that alien nasty broke through the marines' lines and went for the heroes? Has an Eliminated unit truly lost all of its "damage points" or is just unconscious and clinging to life?).

Combine the core games with the appropriate expansion sets, and the feel and flavor of just about any role playing system can be emulated on the Combat Cards or Fantasy Cards battlefield.

So the next time your heroes are about to set out with an escort in tow, give some thought to how the Combat Cardsor the Fantasy Cardsjust might prove to be a real help to you the beleaguered game master...

Overview

The Tactical Assault: Legendary Battles™ are a great way to get even more enjoyment out of your Tactical Assault: Combat or Fantasy Cards. Each Legendary Battles Pack is a near complete print-n-play game – including scenarios, background information, maps and lots of game pieces – which can be printed out and used with your Combat or Fantasy Cards for hours of great gaming!

Topics for the Legendary Battles range from strictly historical to futuristic science-fiction, and from swords & sorcery to modern what-ifs. In addition, every Legendary Battles Pack includes extra game pieces to allow players to develop their own scenarios for the setting. All of this, in a compact format that can easily fit in a large envelope, plastic baggie or small box (for those battles on the go).

Whether you love the idea of playing your Combat or Fantasy Cards in a board game format, or are just looking for a convenient way to be able to get a game in when you are short on space, miniatures or time, the Legendary Battles are for you…

Here are a few shots of the upcoming fourth pack in the Legendary Battles line of board games. This time it is a WWII affair set on the eastern front (i.e. Russians vs. Germans) around the time of the Battle of Kursk.

You might be able to tell from the pictures that this pack comes with a brand new village map, two very challenging scenarios (one all armor & one all infantry) and plenty of extra game pieces to develop your own battles.

What you may not be able to tell from the pictures is that the Germans were not having a good day of it – visible in the number of eliminated units at off the map in the last shot. Enjoy…

There has been a little bit of confusion on how to measure the radius of an effect when counting zones on a map in the Legendary Battles, so we clarified it better in the base rules.

Essentially, when determining the radius of an effect (such as for artillery, smoke, etc.) the zone the effect originates in (e.g. the Target Point, etc.) is not counted as part of the radius distance. Thus when determining an artillery barrage with an effect radius of two zones you would begin counting as you normally would for any other movement, range, etc. with the first zone adjacent to the Target Point.

The Distances section of the rules in the Free Download section have been updated to reflect this.

With the release of the Legendary Battles packs, we have gotten a few questions on how we cut out the round games pieces so crisply and how we turned those into full-fledged cardboard pieces.

As for cutting out the pieces, we use a 3/4″ inch circular scrapbooking punch, available at most crafting stores (e.g. Michaels, Joann Etc., Amazon.com, etc.). Depending on the model, you simply flip it over, line it up on the outer edge of the game piece and punch!

To turn the punched out pieces into full thickness tokens it is a little more involved (and there are a couple of different methods). Our friends over at Boardgamegeek.com have some forum threads that do a better job of explaining these processes than we can. We recommend checking out this link:

For our maps, we just print them out on the heaviest possible cardstock (usually #110 lb. stock), trim them up and put them under Plexiglas when we are playing. Some folks however, like to mount them on a heavy matt board for a more “polished” feel. Again, our friends over at Boardgamegeek.com have a great discussion about doing that: